Browsing by Subject "visual communication design"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Becoming more than makers: the case to balance hard and soft skills in design foundations
    (Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE), 2015-03-26) Ganci, Aaron
    Many industries are looking to creatives to help them separate themselves from their competitors. This is especially true for designers, whose processes and visualization skills make them excellent collaborators for a wide variety of projects. Increasingly, designers find themselves working outside the traditional realm of creative activity.
 To be prepared for this new reality, creatives must add new skills to their traditional technical set. Students need to become experts in soft skills: knowing how to leverage empathy, tap into civic agency, develop research skills, learn to write well, and tell a compelling story. Design academia has been addressing these skills at the upper levels for a several years now. However, in order for creative professionals to truly excel in these new domains, they must begin to practice them earlier in their academic career.
 In this paper, I will make a case that soft skills should become equally important to technical skills within the foundation experience. I will provide insights about what skills are necessary for students to develop at a foundation level. These insights are derived from an ongoing research project where professional designers are observed and interviewed to accurately describe the roles and activity of contemporary design.
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    Designing Digital Experiences: Getting started with user experience, user interface, and interaction design
    (University and College Designers Association (UCDA) Workshop Series, 2016-11-05) Ganci, Aaron
    Designing Digital Experiences is a one-time, full day workshop that covers the basics of designing people-centered websites and software. The processes, outcomes, and tools that are used to create digital experiences will be discussed to provide a succinct picture of the industry today. Hands-on activities will teach participants how to best utilize user insights in their designs, enable them to practice industry-relevant prototyping methods, and highlight the key differences in designing within print and digital environments.
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    The forest and its trees: understanding interaction design through service design activities
    (IxDA Education Summit, 2016-02-28) Ganci, Aaron
    Interaction design and service design have a lot in common. They both focus on improving the experience of people in real-world contexts. Service designers strategically plan the big picture of the experience while interaction designers focus on the tangible details within the user’s interaction experience. These two fields have a lot to offer one another and depend on each other to make a complete design. After all, a service experience is often a sequence of interactions that a person has with artifacts or people. For interaction designers, understanding how their work fits into the bigger picture can be of huge benefit. If the objective of an interaction designer is to assist a person in the achievement of their goals and improve their experience overall, they should widen their perspective and embrace the totality of the experience. Arguably, what happens before and after a person uses a website impacts the overall quality of their experience just as much, if not more, than the interface design elements or physical quality of animations on screen. Understanding the totality of people’s experiences needs to begin in school. Design professionals are too busy to constantly keep the macro and micro elements of the experience in mind. After all, that is why we have the distinct professions. An academic setting is an ideal space to enable interaction designers to consider a person’s broader experience and leverage that consideration into their work. In short, utilizing service design process, methods, and outcomes can improve interaction design students’ understanding of their user and, in turn, enable them to create more appropriate or innovative designs. This presentation will provide an in-depth case study on the curricular use of service design processes and methods to help interaction design students understand their own work. The course which will be discussed, titled “Designing People-Centered Experiences”, is an advanced undergraduate (senior-level) course taught at Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University, IUPUI. This course is a preliminary, 8-week course that initiates students into their senior capstone experience. It engages the students in a discussion about the current state of the design industry, how experience design is defined and what are its parts. In total, the course teaches students how to assess user need and, with that information, design experiences from the the broad strategy to the tangible interfaces. Topics covered will include a framework for how to describe experience design activities, assignment structure for the course, examples of student deliverables, assessment techniques, and insights on how to improve the course experience moving forward.
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    Participatory Innovation: A Pedagogical Approach To Help Students Reveal Real-World Problems
    (IUPUI Research Day, 2014-04-11) Ganci, Aaron
    In the digital sector, ‘innovation’ is a frequently overused word. Entrepreneurs worldwide are trying to innovate within their market. However, the drive for innovation can blind the creators of these products, obscuring what people actually need and want to use. Countless applications struggle or outright fail because they are created without the user in mind. Digital technology can be a powerful tool in people’s everyday life but it has to be integrated in meaningful ways. Careful consideration must be placed on how these new products will integrate—and improve—life. When new products truly help people, they are more likely to resonate and succeed; this is real innovation. Everyone involved in the production of digital products—entrepreneurs, developers, and experience or visual designers (the focus of this project)—must abide by this philosophy in order for the product to be successful. Students who are preparing to be involved with the design or production of these products need to learn ways to more deeply understand their users, identify problems, and craft meaningful solutions. With this in mind, research was conducted to identify and test methods that allow students to acquire this deeper understanding. This poster will outline one pedagogical approach which utilizes participatory design methods to help students identify problems in people’s lives. For this research, visual communication design students utilized these methods in a project for the course Visual Design for the Web. An overview of the pedagogical approach, project, student outcomes, and implications for future work will be highlighted.
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    Smarter User Interfaces
    (Indy UX Salon, 2015-02-26) Ganci, Aaron
    We’re all familiar with the buzzwords around “what’s coming next” in interaction design. The tech industry is bringing ubiquitous computing, wearable technology, augmented reality, and more precise sensors to the masses. Finally, the technological utopia we’ve been promised seems like it’s on its way. This is all well and good but we need to start having a more realistic conversation about how this new world will effect the visual design of user interfaces. This presentation is part of that conversation and will explore some of the opportunities and pitfalls that designers might encounter in the coming years.